Month: August 2011

I got this book relatively recently and dived into it as I thought it would be a quick, episodic read. Well, it was quicker than I thought; of the book’s 190 page heft, only 165 of it are the book itself; the rest are footnotes, index, and whatnot.

The book expands upon an essay, and it shows. Separated into chapters covering conservativism’s rise in talk radio, the blogosphere, new publishers, and on college campuses, the book reads like a series of blog entries where footnotes replace hyperlinks. It’s audience is not the readers of blogs, per se, as most of the information within it is well known to people who have followed blogs for years. Instead, it’s geared to those who read books and newspapers.

In 2011, it’s an interesting time capsule. Its semi-triumphalist tone is kind of amusing given the events of the 2006 and 2008 elections which proved that conservative values were not as widely ascendent as they seemed. Also, the book provides a time capsule of the blogosphere in 2004-2005. Remember when Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson were conservative stalwarts? Good times, good times. Also, the book refers to a blog called “2blowhards” which I don’t think I’d heard of, but the author must have read it plenty. The book shows how much changes and how much has remained the same.

I dunno. It’s an okay book, I suppose. A bit stretched to fit book size and, as I said, a bit dated and a bit redundant if you read blogs.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects a number of news photographs from the century and a half in question. Some were Pulitzer Prize winners, but there are quite a few that I don’t recognize, and more importantly, there are quite a few that I would recognize that are not included herein. So maybe it’s really the best news photos of the period to which the producers of a coffeetable book could get cheap reproduction rights.

That said, each photo has an accompanying couple of paragraphs to explain the context. As though we need context. I’m no history major, but I know what the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was and what the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was. Okay, I did not know who Billy Sunday was, and although I’ve missed the answer on at least one trivia night, I have to continue to repeat to myself to remember that Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to… to… dammit!

At any rate, it’s definitely worth a flip through during a football or baseball game.

Books mentioned in this review:

Given that the Heinlein quotes are making their ways around the Internet courtesy Instapundit (see here and here), I thought I’d pick this book up. Well, I did.

It started out as a pretty good spacer yarn. It revolves around Lazarus Long, previously seen in Methuselah’s Children, which I read as part of The Past Through Tomorrow, as he gets “rejuvenated” 2000 years from now after he’s lived those 2000 years and has run out of things to do. As part of his therapy, he tells stories about his adventures. For about 200 pages, it was cool, but then it got to be a little tedious. There were allusions at a greater plot at work, but that was played out in dribs and drabs. Then, he gets rejuvenated and leads a group from the planet Secundus, the planet where he was rejuvenated and that is becoming a bit stale culturally and politically, to Tertius, where they build the Heinleinian free love commune.

Around that time, where the action switches to the free love commune, the book bogs way down. The first half of each chapter explains how awesome free love and polyamory are, and then we get a couple pages of plot development. Unfortunately, the plot develops that Long travels into the past and then falls in love with his own mother, so we then get about 50 pages of them trying to couple in 1917, and when the attempts at coupling fails, we get 50 pages of them talking dirty to each other. Hey, I’m not a prude, but this stuff made me squicky given 1)It’s a science fiction novel, and 2)It’s his mother.

So, frankly, the book doesn’t hold together very well. It meanders a lot, of course, since it’s kind of a collection of short stories with an overarching plot, sort of. When I was reading this book, I was comparing it a bit to Atlas Shrugged as maybe a collected statement of the author’s philosophy, and I was comparing Heinlein’s plotting skills unfavorably to Rand’s, for crying out loud. Then there are the explicit details of the philosophy, which include a lot of sex, lots of women asking for Long to impregnate them, approval of sex with your own clones, and twisting the head of a fully born baby if it had Down’s syndrome.

Um, yeah. The philosophy expressed within has its good points, as the Instapundit quotes capture and as the Notebooks of Lazarus Long (two sections in the book with bullet points and no narrative, later published independently). However, there’s more to Heinlein’s view of life than that, and it makes this conservative say, “Ew.”

But the man can write some interesting science fiction amid the unclothed rubdowns.

Other Heinlein reviews:

• The Past Through Tomorrow
• A Heinlein Trio
• Infinite Possibilities
• Friday
• Farnham’s Freehold

I do so prefer his rocket jockey stuff to the adult books, for what it’s worth.

Books mentioned in this review:

Last spring, I lost a part from my rototiller, so I went down to the sporting goods store and bought a metal detector to find it. And since I live on the edge of the Old Wire Road / Trail of Tears, I thought I might become a relic hunter–that’s what the people who use metal detectors call themselves. Or treasure hunters if they look for pure metal. So I ordered this book to get an idea of how to use my metal detector.

The book was written by Charles Garrett, President of the Garrett Metal Detectors company, so the book gives a lot of attention to the innovations in the latest Garrett detectors. It provides a broad overview, from looking for coins on the beach to using metal detectors to prospect for gold in the American West. It has a chapter on how good the hobby is for seniors and children. Ergo, it’s a little broader than I would have hoped.

I guess to get the knowledge I hope for, I’ll have to spend a little more time using the device rather than reading about it. Ain’t that the way?

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a short collection of tales from Ozarks lore, broken into categories such as “Tales of the Supernatural”, “Indian Tales”, “Treasure Tales”, “Outlaw Stories”, and so on. None of them are well-researched or well-documented, but they do give one interesting stories to tell the children and ideas for little essays and historical bits if one wants to put in the time to conduct real research.

The best bit about this book, though, is this written on the title page:

As some of you assuredly know, the William Quantrill led a pro-Confederate band of guerrillas in the Civil War. The William Quantrill does not appear in this book, so it’s not a notation of a previous owner. I assume it was the name of the previous owner, perhaps a distant relation of The William Quantrill. So I can boast I own a book once owned by William Quantrill, but given that this is the 1998 reprinting of a book that first appeared in 1983, it’s not The William Quantrill. But those to whom I boast need not know.

Books mentioned in this review: